Longing, or: Struggling to Become a Part-Time Writer
For months and years and weeks and days I have been grappling with the fact that I do not write. This is no longer itself interesting. I understand why I do not write; the two chief reasons are my profession (translation) and my fathoms-deep fear of failure. At work, I process words in two languages for 35 to 38 hours per week, something outsiders and insiders to the industry alike acknowledge is cognitively taxing.
I love my job—just writing this I am emotional! Every day, I am so grateful to do what I do. Five days per week, whether I “write” or not, I write. For as long as I have this job, my skills will never die. On the best days, translating hones them.
This is a tremendous balm to me when I force myself to consider the other thing.
I’ve learned I can’t compose words outside of work during the week if I want to do my work well or joyfully. But, as though by some cosmic counterbalance, sometime around 8:00 p.m. every Saturday, I also become almost physically hungry to write.
And then I do not do it.
Why is that? I ask myself this constantly and then put on another YouTuber talking about how their own writing week went. In June I went through a brief reading drought, fortunately forcefully over, and I found myself asking the same question then: why don’t I want to read? In that case, the cause was emotional: my mental health was poor, I was adrift, the world is a fuck, I didn’t feel connected to the people around me, I thought they found me very bad. Reading felt trivial. I picked up and put down many things, nothing spoke to me, nothing reflected the correct gravitas. The only thing that finally grabbed me was Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse, which of course is about grief.
As indeed I was grieving, this was the only way through. Grief is a strange emotion for me, one I feel almost constantly. People find me a cipher, but it’s a necessary flattening. Showing my usual emotional range and intensity would be, I think, too much for most. It is often unwieldy for me; but I cherish living this way deeply. I find it has been extremely useful in my writing, in enjoying art, and in the business of living.
So here in the sorrow times, being in and of my own sorrow and others’ as our rights wither and institutions crumble, I question again why I cannot write. Writing is a salient response to sorrow. For me, it is an essential sense-making activity. Yet today as the 8:00 p.m. hunger set in and as I recognized and acknowledged it, I continued to play my terrible video game. I wanted to stop doing what I was doing and do the thing that…
Well, what? Writing is no longer my central engine. It was once. I have the very strong, persistent, even imprudent sense that it could be again.
But I simply do not take action toward it. It is a matter of do not; lately I have the time and the inclination. There is a whisper of cannot in there, but my own inaction is the only thing stopping me. This is what it comes down to: it is less that I feel a drive to write and more that I long to…
Another incomplete sentence, complete in another way: I long. I am defined by yearning. I long for something writing gives me that I do not seem able to access now.
I think of writing mainly as THE WORK. Lately I have been reading about not-quite-creatures: mushrooms, jellyfish, slimes. The drive to write is a slime within me: alive enough to writhe and occasionally to convert will into words, but for the most part just sitting there telepathically sending me messages about THE WORK.
You may be asking what THE WORK looks like for me when I am not doing it. Me as well. The trouble with believing in THE WORK is that it then becomes possible to fail at THE WORK. At the current time, the metrics of failure are entirely my own. I face them every time I sit down even to write one of these wretched little newsletters: the copy is never good enough, it does not do what I want it to, it does not reflect my intention. I wish to sit down on a Saturday night and write one essay, and then I wish to hit send and go to sleep. This is not possible. This is not in keeping with THE WORK. THE WORK demands that I leverage my admittedly [some time here spent hedging and obfuscating what I really want to say; very well, with confidence:] strong writing skills [THRILL! HORROR! SHAME!] and do something that impresses me.
As I learned in June while unable to meaningfully read, I am not easily impressed anymore. Yesterday I read Yiyun Li’s devastating memoir about losing her second son to suicide, Things in Nature Merely Grow (several excerpts here). She described her relationship to writing in the wake of her sons’ deaths in a way that haunted me partially because I recognized something of myself in her description of it: there was no reason to stop the work, so the work continued. She continued to teach, she wrote, she read, she cancelled some things but stayed on as a judge for a book award because it gave some structure to her days and weeks. THE WORK, at this point, was to write a book for her son James, as she had when her older son Vincent had died by the same cause years earlier. THE WORK was a testament and tribute to him, or her relationship with him, or both.
My personal issues are piddly things compared to hers, but such a salient account of her version of THE WORK helped me crack open my version of THE WORK. Lately, while grappling with why I am scared to fail to the point of action paralysis, I have been asking myself what writing without fear would look like.
The image was this: unbidden by any other business, left to my own devices without a partner sharing my space, I imagined using every surface in my home as a prospective writing surface. During my June drought, I accumulated a hefty pile of books by my bedside into which I had gotten a handful of paragraphs, five chapters, 100 pages. I tripled my monthly book budget. Collecting acorns for winter. A friend asked me what I was reading and I realized I was at risk of listing 13 books. I imagined now these acorns, every book on my shelves I have not yet gotten around to reading, arranged in stacks on my kitchen table, my coffee table, my work desk, my living room writing nook, my dresser, three chairs, the floor, the cat. Close at hand to reference for whatever I was writing as I carried my laptop around from pile to pile.
Living on my own during my Master’s research, I briefly lived this reality. I do not remember how I felt about it, except that it was cumbersome. I don’t think this is a reasonable way for most people to live, but the point was to imagine. I notably also imagined showing this disorder to someone as proof of something. See? I explained to a friend in this vision. I have a great deal to do. This is THE WORK. These are its components. This is what it looks like.
From this unhinged little exercise, I discern that I appear to want to exist somewhere unbound from time and space in order to write. [Several expletives deleted.] My idealized writing space is to turn my apartment into an elabourate labyrinth of an office. I wish to place every thought I have had into some kind of physical external reference for me to leaf through when I need to check on something, as I had when I did traditional research.
But my life is different now. I do not write full-time; in this I am now a weekend warrior. I do live with a partner and mustn’t clutter him in. I have work I enjoy that delivers me a steady paycheque. It is not appropriate to use the floor as a library. My cat likes to eat books. This alternative would not end well for anyone.
But I think the gist of the idea is worthy of consideration. Today when my writing hunger set in, I ignored it and I did not do anything about it, and an hour and a half later I turned off my silly little video game and I went to the grocery store and I made myself dinner and then I stood in the kitchen feeling wretched. THE WORK was eluding me only because I was letting it. This was my failure metric of the day and I was meeting it handily, yet I could not seem to do anything about it. I checked my phone. I joked with a friend about Lord of the Rings. Then in a fit of stubbornness I pulled The Hobbit off my shelf, and also a Bolaño novella I was hoping to absorb some Saturday evening, and pulled the short story collection I’m reading out of my bag (Hellions, Julia Elliott), and I took them all to bed and I set them on top of my existing stack: VanderMeer, Merlin Sheldrake, Cixin Liu, LeGuin, Catherine Lacey (spite book), Tokarczuk, Zoey Leigh Peterson, a running memoir, Diana Gabaldon (for my sins).
And I laughed. I recognized in this my image of THE WORK. It is THE WORK, and not me, that exists outside of time and space. It is not appropriate to use the floor as a library, but my bedside table is a rotating version of the same stacks. THE WORK—the research component, at least—is happening slowly and sporadically, but it is happening.
Perhaps the thing I long for is the same thing I am already doing but that, in the circumstances of my life, I cannot commit wholeheartedly to.
What I long for, perhaps—the thing I feel I lack—is that commitment itself, the feeling of rising each day to work on my own project and having little else to worry about. Of being consumed by it, of having something to point to that is physical proof of the THE WORK. Perhaps this is behind the constant and terrible ache I have to go back to grad school. I do not wish to go to school anymore—this is finally clear to me—but what I wish for is an excuse to wholeheartedly commit myself to a single project.
The ache is a lie. I did not flourish in graduate school. I felt the same pressure then that I feel now, the same crushing fear of failing myself, and I have felt it since in other endeavours. By circumstance, I was forced to push through it then. I wrote the thesis, and it was a good thesis. But I was not good while writing it. My life is better now because it is balanced.
I do not know how to be a part-time writer. I know how to be a full-time writer, or a no-time writer. My fear of failure is more acute because I know the time and energy I have to commit to THE WORK is limited by, among other things, my profession. Lacking an ability to commit daily, I fear I am all the more likely to fail to meet my own expectations.
I long to meet my own expectations. My only actual expectation is that I simply try to do THE WORK. I must try to do it even when it seems to me that I am failing at it, when I cannot make my apartment into dizzying stacks, when I must make certain sacrifices of commitment in order to be good at my day job.
Tonight, may it be good enough to hit send on this terrible missive and go to sleep.